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Jazsko
Contributor
Contributor

Storage VS Storage

Hi,

We are currently in a process of deciding which storage we should choose for our VMware environment.

The environment is put together of 3 physical Dell servers, and one EMC NX4 NAS box with two extra arrays, effective storage of 10 TB. That is with RAID and hot spares configured.

Currently we are looking at three different Storage types. Dell Equallogic 6100XV or 6210XS, the new EMC vnxe2 or Nimble CS240.

Today we are also using Cifs for user home folders and Citrix profiles, but would like to push this out to a virtual windows server, so we can use Veeam to back it up.

Any suggestions or experiences would be highly appreciated.

thanks

6 Replies
vipinvk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have no experience with DELL and Nimble storages . But as we have EMC VNX-2 (I think you meant VNX-2) in this list, I would go for EMC only.

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Linjo
Leadership
Leadership

Have you had a look at VSAN yet? Fits most of your needs and probably for a lower price then the options you listed.

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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Jazsko
Contributor
Contributor

Hi, thanks for the reply. I acctually meant VNXe 2,

http://www.emc.com/storage/vnx/vnxe-series.htm

Its a new series that is comming out now.

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Jazsko
Contributor
Contributor

VSAN is not an option Smiley Happy

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ted_beverly
Contributor
Contributor

Hey Jazsko, why not VSan?

Also we've been looking at a new solution as well to replacing our aging HP Lefthands.  We have almost exactly the same environment you havel.  Three ESXi 5.1 hosts on 3 Dell r420 Poweredge servers with an iSCSI connection to our SAN environment sitting on a dedicated Gigabit backbone where each ESX host has an aggregated LAG group of 4 GB Nic ports each.  The big reason we're moving is due to the age of the LeftHands and the limitation of IOPS (capping at 2400 on a regular basis)  I've spent the past month courting NetApp, Vsan, EMC, Compellent, Equal logic, Nimble, a hosted solution, data center hosting for storage, and a hosted leasing by the TB solution from another vendor.  So far they are listing from best to least:  1. Nimble CS220, 2. NetApp FS2552, 3. Vsan, 4. EMC VNXe3200, and the rest are off the board because of the prohibitive cost of IOPs/$ based off the number of spindles needed to get to the IOPs i'm looking for.  Complete FLASH arrays are completely off the board due to cost and failure rates of a complete read/write SSD environment over time.  Both Nimble and NetApp do preprocessing at the ram cache level, but Nimble has the speed there due to sequential writes and compression methodologies i've seen so far.  EMC VNXe3200 shows signs of similar technology, but I have yet to do a deep dive on the tech with the engineer to get to the guts of the data processing path.  VSan may move off the list just due to how new the tech is, but if you're just looking for compute and capacity in your storage solution and not all the fancy software that comes with most of the other solutions, you'll find that the price is much more cost effective, but its a home grown system you'll be running even if you do have support from VMware as long as the hardware you use is on their HCL.

Ted B.

Jazsko
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Ted,

Thanks for your replay.

We have also placed Nimble as a number one. So far EQL is on second and EMC on third place. Read a lot about Nimble on the net, very few negative responses. Many people are positive about the box ( btw, we are also looking at cs220).

Unless Dell or EMC can beat the pricing and performance on Nimble we will go for it. The product seems to be great, and after reading all the reviews, to good to be true Smiley Happy

Will report back on what we choose Smiley Happy

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